EveryChild.SG’s radical plan for educational reform

EveryChild.SG, a non-profit organisation dedicated to holistic and equitable child development in Singapore, recently released a 19-page proposal that includes their recommendations on how to transform primary school education in Singapore. 

The proposal was drafted following a successful series of engagement efforts with the public. The organisation now plans to share its findings and assertions with the relevant governing parties in the coming weeks.

The roadmap, which spans 10 years and includes details on how pilot tests could be implemented, includes suggestions on how to abolish PSLE in favor of a regular test-based system that takes place across the year, as well as how to redefine the streaming criteria that schools currently use to sort students into Subject-Based Banding (SBB) in secondary schools. 

Changes to testing

One of EveryChild.SG’s first recommendations is to make PSLE an optional assessment that can be taken on an opt-in basis, rather than a compulsory examination for all P6 students. 

Starting with a pilot of 10 primary and secondary schools, the organisation suggests that students who choose not to take PSLE or DSA will be allocated to Subject-Based Banding (SBB) in their partner secondary schools using their overall results from P5 to P6. 

This will be done through a “through-train” system, where at least 80% of secondary schools are partnered with a primary school for intake. Selective schools and specialised academic schools (which cater to the less academically-inclined) should only cater to 5% or 10% of the population, with the remaining students being offered education in through-train schools. 

To reduce the emphasis on centralised exams as a whole, standardised multiple-choice tests should be implemented, occurring regularly over the course of the school year to more accurately benchmark students’ improvement against a national standard. 

Adapting for a global curriculum

Smaller class sizes have long been one of the suggestions floating around the education system, with many studies showing that they allow students more opportunities to engage in discussion and receive one-to-one feedback. Though MOE has usually stopped short of implementing this idea, EveryChild.SG’s roadmap details specific suggested class sizes to be trialled (from the current 30 to 20 in P1 and P2 and from 40 to 25 for P3 to P6). 

By their estimate, only an extra 2 to 4 teachers would be needed per pilot school, eventually increasing to nearly 9,000 additional teachers when rolled out nationwide — numbers, the organisation says, that could come from the tuition industry’s estimated 30,000 to 50,000 teachers in Singapore. 

In addition to the suggested reduction in class sizes, the roadmap suggests that MOE’s curriculum needs to be updated in order to adhere to its 21st Century Competencies, emphasising less rote memorisation and more big-picture thinking that can be applied across many more fields. 

EveryChild.SG recommends that this should be done by adopting a preexisting curriculum like the International Baccalaureate’s Primary Year Programme (IB PYP) or the International Primary Curriculum (IPC) alongside the through-train system, giving teachers both a smaller class size and a more participational style of teaching to work with. 

Fairness in education

The final — and arguably one of the most controversial — suggestions in the roadmap is the phasing out of parental alumni, donation or volunteering-based admissions for all schools. There’s a strong emphasis on it — “We seem to have forgotten that schools are taxpayer-funded, public institutions,” the roadmap says in bold. 

EveryChild.SG’s provided alternative is instead a centralised and automated allocation system; one that takes into account racial and socioeconomic diversity, geographic proximity and parental choice while auto-assigning each child to a school. 

Transport subsidies would be provided for lower-income children assigned to a faraway school, while schools that plan to keep ‘community-based admissions’ to preserve their heritage would be allocated a certain amount of places for discretionary admissions. 

What does this mean for the future of education in Singapore?

“We wanted to take the conversation out of the abstract,” said Pooja Bhandari, founder of EveryChild.SG. “We’re not just saying, ‘Let’s reduce class sizes’. We’re saying: Here’s how you do it, here’s what it would cost, and here’s what we could gain in return.” 

The organisation has certainly walked their talk — their 19-page roadmap contains comprehensive guidelines that cover a period of ten years, with detailed plans for test pilots, budget estimates, and flowcharts that visualise the Singapore school system as they imagine it could be. 

Although it is now up to MOE to see if any of these measures are feasible, the proposal is right about at least one thing: it’s about time we started seeing changes to the Singaporean education system. 

“If we want a generation that’s future-ready, we need to start at the foundation,” said Bhandari. “This roadmap is our contribution to that vision: a plan to support children to not just survive in school, but thrive.”